Status codes · one code429 — Too Many Requests
What a 429 Too Many Requests response means, who is at fault, what a visitor should do and what the server owner should do.
Open the reference on this codeWhat to do
If it is someone else's site
Wait as long as the response says and stop refreshing — every refresh counts as another request and pushes the unblock further away. If the limit comes from a site rather than your own script, a few minutes' pause is what helps.
If it is your server
For the client: read Retry-After and retry with exponential backoff plus jitter — otherwise every client returns at the same moment and hits the limit again. For the server: a 429 must carry Retry-After and should not count as an application error — it is a normal answer, and keeping it apart from 5xx in monitoring stops the error graph from lying.
Easily confused with
the service is unavailable as a whole rather than for you personally: overload or maintenance.
503 →that one is about a slow request from the client, not about how many there were.
408 →How to check
how long to wait and how much of the limit is left
check a single request without starting another burst
The reference holds sixty-four codes searchable by number, name and meaning — plus a breakdown of confusing pairs such as 401 and 403.
Updated